I just got back from Doe v. Reed. A really great bout to end this term’s oral arguments. I’ll have my ABA Journal piece up later today.

In the meantime, check out my interview on American Public Media’s “The Story” with Dick Gordon. The segment begins at 31:00. If you’d rather go terrestrial, click here to find airtimes for “The Story” on your local NPR affiliate.

Finally, Justice Kennedy made me eat my words with his opinion in in Salazar v. Buono. No time to do an opinion analysis on it right now, other than to note how fractured the majority coalition was:

KENNEDY, J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered an opinion, in which ROBERTS, C. J., joined, and in which ALITO, J., joined in part. ROBERTS, C. J., filed a concurring opinion. ALITO, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. SCALIA, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which THOMAS, J., joined. STEVENS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GINSBURG and SOTOMAYOR, JJ., joined. BREYER, J., filed a dissenting opinion.

Like this:

Because today’s opinions werealldogs, let me entertain you with some rank speculation regarding this term’s two church-state cases.

Justice Kennedy is the only member of the Court yet to write an opinion from the October sitting. As of today, Salazar v. Buono remains the only case not yet decided from the October sitting.

The delay in Buono augurs a bitter split with lots of footnotes flying around. From the oral argument transcript, let me go out on a limb and say that Kennedy sided with the liberals on this one. Perhaps the conservatives–or, at least Scalia and Alito, by the write-ups–hoped the Court would rule more broadly than the standing issue that the rest of the justices ultimately focused upon. Or maybe the decision’s delay means that in Kennedy’s hands, the opinion did address the broader merits of whether Congress violated the Establishment Clause by transferring its ownership of a desert cross on government lands to a private entity so to avoid First Amendment suits.

Either way, perhaps the justices’ post-argument positioning triggered the Court’s December cert. grant toChristian Legal Society v. Martinez, which the justices had sat on since the spring. Wanting to make up for one (still totally conjectural) church-state loss with Buono, the conservative bloc may have sensed in CLS a big, broad win for the Free Exercise Clause.

The Court heard CLS on Monday. The justices fell to their familiar positions, but the conservatives’ (still totally speculative) gamble may have been for naught: Justice Kennedy didn’t seem at all convinced that the case’s facts had been sufficiently clarified to garner a ruling on the merits.

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll get the decisions. But whether I’m spectacularly right or wrong on what when down behind the curtain may have to wait until Justice Stevens’s papers go public. And for the sake of sating speculation, let’s hope Stevens will mimic Marshall and Blackmun‘s speedy release of their papers rather than follow Souter down the fifty-year memory hole.